Space Politics
Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…
Archive for November, 2009
November 30, 2009 at 7:34 am · Filed under Other
When President Obama visited China earlier this month, the US and China issued a joint statement that included a passage about space cooperation, including “starting a dialogue on human space flight and space exploration”. Cooperation would be a good thing, right? Not necessarily, according to some.
In an Aviation Week op-ed last week, Eric Sterner warns cooperation could lead to more technology transfer, something that, in the 1990s, led to stiffened export control regulations that transferred commercial satellites and their components to the US Munitions List. Such transfer is worrisome, he argues, not only because it could aid Chinese military modernization but also because China is a “serial proliferator” who could then transfer such technologies to places like Iran and North Korea. “Until China’s intentions are clearer and its behavior has verifiably and persistently changed,” he concludes, “close cooperation entails risks that far exceed the potential benefits.”
In this week’s issue of The Space Review, Taylor Dinerman raises concerns about the appearance of cooperation between the US and China. If the US looks like it’s trying too hard to cooperate with China (or other countries, for that matter), it could give the appearance of weakness. He also notes that previous models for international cooperation, such as Apollo-Soyuz and ISS, don’t fit the current situation, in part because of the lack of knowledge about what is motivating China’s human spaceflight program. “If the US presents itself as too eager for partnership agreements or too weak to explore the solar system without assistance, then the world and the American people will only see softness.”
November 30, 2009 at 7:21 am · Filed under Congress, NASA
Last month most of the Texas Congressional delegation sent a letter to President Obama asking that $3 billion in stimulus funding be redirected to NASA. Beyond the question of whether the president has the authority to do so (as the money was specifically appropriated by Congress), there was another issue: a number of the congressmen who signed the letter had previously voted against the stimulus bill. That hasn’t escaped the attention of Democrats, namely the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). In a press release last week, the DCCC called out 18 Texas Republicans who signed the letter but also voted against the bill. The citation for each representative is the same: the congressman “showed his hypocrisy after asking the Obama Administration for three billion in funds for NASA from the economic recovery act, which he voted against.” (The listings are so repetitive that the one for Rep. Mac Thornberry calls him Lamar Smith.)
November 24, 2009 at 7:21 am · Filed under Congress
The House Science and Technology Committee has released the witness lineup for its hearing next Wednesday, December 2, on “Ensuring the Safety of Human Space Flight”:
- Mr. Bretton Alexander, President, Commercial Spaceflight Federation
- Dr. Joseph Fragola, Vice President, Valador Inc.
- Mr. Jeff Hanley, Program Manager, Constellation Program, Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, NASA
- Mr. John Marshall, Council Member, Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, NASA
- Mr. Bryan O’Connor, Chief of Safety and Mission Assurance, NASA
- Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Thomas Stafford
I’m not familiar with the positions of some of the people on the panel, but right now the only person who appears to be a strong advocate of commercial human spaceflight is Alexander. (Others may support the concept, but not to the same degree.)
The hearing is scheduled for the exact same time (10 am December 2) as a hearing on “Commercial Space Transportation” by the aviation subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. No hearing information, including planned witnesses, has been released, although as previously noted here the chairman of the full committee, James Oberstar, has been critical of commercial space transportation laws and regulations in the past.
November 23, 2009 at 12:58 pm · Filed under Lobbying
In today’s issue of The Space Review I summarize some of the recent lobbying efforts, and the problems associated with them, that I’ve discussed here in the last week or so, including the dueling March Storms, the SaveNASA effort, and Save Space’s letter-writing campaign. A couple of items in the article that I had not previously posted here:
- Both ProSpace and the Space Frontier Foundation are proceeding with their planned lobbying efforts early next year, although Mike Heney, project manager of the Foundation’s project, said that they’re “not worried about naming the event at this point”.
- Frank DiBello, president of Space Florida, provided a little more information about the source of that claim that the campaign had reached its goal of a half-million letters, saying that a White House staffer he ran into on Capitol Hill mentioned the large number of letters, originally a couple hundred thousand but later increased to 400,000 to 500,000.
Also, to make it clear that it isn’t just the space activist community that has problems with its advocacy, Dwayne Day profiles the lackluster PETA protest outside NASA Headquarters last week: “their theatrics were so underwhelming that they might have failed to make their point.” (The PETA protest, if you missed it, was about plans by NASA to fund research that will involve irradiating monkeys.) Perhaps PETA should have gone with a backup plan: “I’d rather go naked that irradiate monkeys.” At least the passers-by would have appreciated it…
November 23, 2009 at 6:30 am · Filed under NASA, White House
A few other notes from Alan Ladwig’s talk Friday at the University of Nebraska space law conference in Washington:
Ladwig acknowledged the uncertainty that many have felt over the last year about the future policy direction of the new administration. “The space community has been a little on edge during the past 11 months, waiting to see what the Obama Administration has in store for us,” he said, calling the agency currently a “work in progress.” “The space community is not a patient lot, and we’re not putting up well with the pace, the priority, and the inconvenience of having to wait for the new administration to determine our direction and level of resources committed to the civil space program.”
Some changes might be visible soon, though. Ladwig noted that new administrator Charles Bolden is now free to make organizational changes and realign personnel in the agency now that he’s passed the 120-day mark in his tenure there. “We expect an announcement on that to be coming before Thanksgiving.”
Ladwig said that the upcoming decision on NASA’s human spaceflight program by the White House, coupled with NASA’s led leadership, offers an “enormous opportunity” for NASA to better align its programs with administration priorities. In that vein, he fired a shot at some space advocates. “You’d be amazed at the number of people in the space community that don’t quite understand that NASA is part of the executive branch, that we can’t just go off and do what we want to do, that we’re supposed to be aligned with what the president wants to do,” he said. “If you look at the history of NASA, I’m not convinced that’s always been the case.” He added that there’s “a lot of arrogance in our community” about choosing programs and destinations because they’re possible, not because they’re aligned with greater goals. That might explain, he said, why NASA ended up with $1 billion in stimulus money, while organizations like NSF and NIH got significantly more.
“This is an administration that does care about NASA, that is going to focus on what we do,” he said. “We’re hoping that when this decision is made, that comes through with the funding we need to do all of these things.”
In his new position leading public outreach efforts, Ladwig said he plans to devote efforts to developing “good, compelling rationales for the space program.” The rationales developed over the last 50 years all tend to align in one of several themes, from economic growth and national leadership to education and technology development. “Those are all good, but none of them seem to be compelling enough in their own right.” He cited as one example of something he liked as Krafft Ehricke’s “The Extraterrestrial Imperative” from the 1970s: that the future of civilization depended on humanity’s expansion into space.
November 21, 2009 at 4:17 pm · Filed under NASA, Other
That was the suggestion floated by NASA’s Alan Ladwig during a speech Friday morning at the 2nd Annual Space and Telecom Law Conference in Washington, organized by Space and Telecom Law Program of the University of Nebraska’s College of Law. Ladwig, who just transitioned from his former role as senior advisor to the administrator to deputy associate administrator for communications for public outreach, said that it was highly likely that regardless whatever decision the White House makes on the future of NASA’s human spaceflight program, the ISS will likely be extended beyond 2015: “If there’s anything I can probably say openly and make a bet on, is that the space station is going to continue.”
A big reason for continuing the space station, he said, is to maintain its international partnership and ensure that partners like Europe and Japan who just got the labs added to the station in the last couple of years can make maximum use of them. “We do think that, from an international perspective, the station is going forward,” he said. He then added, “One of the things my office is going to try and promote this year is to try and get the International Space Station nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s been going on now for ten years. It’s the largest technological international endeavor ever undertaken, and it seems to be going pretty well… I think it’s a pretty good testament to what can be done when we collaborate together.”
One question about this effort is who would actually receive the prize: while the Peace Prize has routinely been awarded to agencies and organizations, there is no “International Space Station Organization” that would be the logical choice for laureate. Ladwig said after his talk that he didn’t yet know how to handle that, but was looking for potential nominators, including, perhaps, former vice president (and 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate) Al Gore.
November 19, 2009 at 6:49 am · Filed under Lobbying
If your idea of space advocacy can’t be contained to 140-character tweets, you’re in luck: a couple of organizations have set plans for grassroots lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill early next year. The Space Exploration Alliance has announced plans for its 2010 Legislative Blitz, scheduled for February 21-23. (Some of the language on the web site, though, still refers to their 2009 event.) The exact legislative agenda isn’t listed, although the site does refer to the Augustine committee report and the need to increase NASA’s funding.
ProSpace has also set a date for its March Storm 2010: February 28-March 2. Preliminary agenda items will be posted in the near future. No word, though, on the state of the controversy between ProSpace and the Space Frontier Foundation, which announced plans last week for its own March Storm event.
November 19, 2009 at 6:40 am · Filed under Lobbying
It seems some NASA supporters took the news about a potential across-the-board budget cut in FY2011 (which may or may not happen, and may or may not include NASA) pretty hard: on the microblogging service Twitter, the news generated a flurry of tweets in the last day or so, all tagged with the search term “#saveNASA”. While it’s not clear just in how much jeopardy NASA’s budget is, it hasn’t stopped people from rallying that something needs to be done to, well, save NASA.
What that something is isn’t clear: most of the tweets are actually “retweeting” other posts, most of which cite the technological spinoffs created by NASA (good if you’re trying to justify technology development, not as effective if you’re trying to save human spaceflight). An example: “If you don’t think we should #SaveNASA, please throw away ur pacemaker, dialysis machine, cancer detection technology, cell phone, etc. Thx!” Then there are the electoral threats: “Dear Obama. I voted for you. I in fact managed to get my whole family to vote for you (amazing!) Now is your time to keep my vote. #SaveNASA”
What these “space tweeps” plan to do to convince the White House to save NASA isn’t clear yet. One person has created a social networking site whose stated goal is to “convince the Obama Administration to maintain NASA’s funding” (wait, what about that $3-billion-a-year increase space advocates had been supporting?), but other than that there’s no focus, nor any reason why this should exist rather than joining existing groups and efforts. Perhaps the plan is to inundate the White House with pro-NASA tweets: after all, @BarackObama is big on Twitter. (What’s that, you say, President Obama says he’s never used Twitter? Time for a #planB.)
November 18, 2009 at 1:15 pm · Filed under Lobbying
In late September Save Space kicked off its efforts to get half a million letters in support of the space program delivered to the White House by the end of October. By late October, though, that goal looked doubtful: the metrics they had provided (in terms of web traffic and Facebook fans) appeared to fall far short of what was needed to generate that many letters, and a spokesperson indicated that it would be more of an “open-ended venture”.
However, in a video posted to the web site with remarkably little fanfare (primarily just a single tweet), Space Florida president Frank DiBello claims that the effort mets its goal, and by the October 31 deadline, with a “devastating impact” in DC. “While I was in Washington two weeks ago, I had a meeting with some people in the White House who wanted to know what they could do with all the letters that they’ve got,” DiBello said in the video, dated November 10. “And their estimate is that they have some 500,000 letters in Washington, all in support of the space program. And they have an issue for security – they can’t deliver them to the White House – but believe me, the White House knows that they’re there.”
Without more supporting information, though, it’s difficult to accept this. The Save Space campaign started on September 28, while DiBello’s meeting, if his timing is correct, would have been the week of October 26, just four weeks later. For Save Space to have met its 500,000-letter goal it would need to generate an average of 125,000 letters a week. That’s about twice what the White House receives per week overall, as POLITICO noted last month. That sort of volume would probably overwhelm the people charged with reviewing them (indeed, there was a backlog of 25,000 letters noted in the POLITICO article), making it difficult for them to ascertain they’re “all in support of the space program”. I’ve put in a request with the Save Space people to confirm this information and clarify what the status of this letter-writing campaign is.
November 18, 2009 at 7:06 am · Filed under Other
After Tuesday’s meeting between Presidents Obama and Hu, the two countries issued a joint statement covering a wide range of issues, including one paragraph about space issues:
The United States and China look forward to expanding discussions on space science cooperation and starting a dialogue on human space flight and space exploration, based on the principles of transparency, reciprocity and mutual benefit. Both sides welcome reciprocal visits of the NASA Administrator and the appropriate Chinese counterpart in 2010.
Space also merited one sentence later, on security issues: “The two sides believed that the two countries have common interests in promoting the peaceful use of outer space and agree to take steps to enhance security in outer space.”
The former passage sounds similar to efforts in the last several years to start to develop greater cooperation between the two countries in space, including a 2006 visit to China by then-administrator Mike Griffin. Those cooperative efforts were hindered by the January 2007 Chinese ASAT test, which leads to the latter passage, although it’s not clear what might be involved in steps to “enhance security” in space.
Next entries »
